[boost] asio library

Out of curiousity (reading somebody comment here regarding socket calls) I looked into the asio library and found the following example code below. My question is: What is the use of the socket object created in the first line? I think this line must always be followed by some more code. Because of this it does not make sense, that a library exports this functionality. boost::asio::ip::tcp::socket socket(io_service); boost::system::error_code ec; socket.open(boost::asio::ip::tcp::v4(), ec); if (ec) { // An error occurred. }